Racialism was already routine in Europe by the close of the Middle Ages

Evidence

By the ending of the Middle Ages, racialism was a routine manifestation, finding expression even in the more exotic mental recesses of the maniac and hysterical. For 400 years, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the capitalist mode of production in Europe engulfed agrarian and artisanal workers, transforming them over the generations into expropriated, dependent fodder for concentration in factories, disciplined to the rhythms and turbulences of the manufacturing process, the organizers of the capitalist world system appropriated Black labor power as constant capital. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1429

Categorization

• XREF: Key supporting claim for the thesis that racism predates and is not reducible to capitalism — connects to the ‘racial capitalism’ literature (e.g., Ibram Kendi, Walter Rodney). — connects to: Europeans already possessed race as a ready concept before enslaving Africans — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 56; Early modern Spain and Portugal pioneered hereditary notions of bodily racial difference. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 114